Pay CSRs better to retain them for longer so that they become more and more skilled.
Call centers have massive turnover rates because frankly, the job kind of sucks. Bizarre shifts, sometimes extremely long shifts, and crap pay, depending on where you work. Customer service is something everyone complains about. A little more respect for reps would help a lot. Make it into a worthy career, and maybe people will stick around. Provide break time and ample vacation. Provide benefits. Encourage people to stay in the position for several years and become skilled at whatever it is they are supporting, rather than using the job as a stepping stone to other things. One skilled, experienced rep is probably better than 3 or 4 clueless new hires. In time, these reps should become coaches to new hires. People with generic management skills are *not*, simply by nature of having managed people, qualified to be a team leader in a call center. Handling even the most technical of technical support calls can be 50% psychology. It's not necessarily even that your problem is fixed, but that you leave happy and maintain your service.
But if you want bargain basement prices, that's where they're going to cut corners. It is where they have always cut corners. They're not going to cut the salaries and benefits of the executive officers in the company to save cash; that's for sure.
Don't take your frustration out on the reps. They've been dealing with upset, and sometimes childishly rude customers all day. As reps are bottom on the corporate totem pole, they have little influence over anything. Perhaps they are lucky and have a progressive management that listens to them. Probably not. They are probably underpaid or outright exploited contractors whose performance is based on metrics that have little to do with how happy you actually are, except to the extent that you affect the bottom line in some significant way.
If you get poor service, complain to the top. If a CSR is downright rude, mention them by name. They need to be disciplined or terminated. If you're ticked off about the service, spare the CSR, because it will be easier to fire the CSR than make systemic changes to the way the call center is managed (which may include things like training.)
I assume the Slashdot crowd here uses online "self servicing" before calling. Know that many people don't. Know that many people choose to engage in a 45 minute call (including hold time and navigating VRUs) rather than take 5 minutes to do a search on the website. The hold times you are experiencing may be a result of customers like this (and obviously, yes, if you're talking about an ISP, some people can't get online to use self-servicing, but you'd be surprised how many people are simply lazy).
10% of customers are simply unprofitable due to the havoc they wreak on their own computers, and the number of times they call technical support. Many customers will attempt to disguise problems they themselves caused, as a problem with the service whose tech support line they are calling. For example, a customer downloads malware which screws their system up. They will call and say that "your software" did this to their system and you damn well better help. Or it's Microsoft's problem, or some other piece of software they insist on running is interfering with your product.
Customers expect reps to be experts on every piece of software, OS, and possible configuration. I've seen people call reps "morons" because they don't know how to support FreeBSD or obscure desktop-altering applications on their $7.50 an hour salaries.
Sometimes CSRs are bastards because they've been dealing with childish jerks all day. Some CSRs are incompetent, or ill-tempered and don't belong on a company's front lines, but this is probably the exception rather than the rule. There are many reasons for bad customer service, but most of it has to do with shortcuts take
You should try actually reading my post, wherein I specifically talk about *dumb teenagers* and then address the ones who are not, rather than "just skimming" (your words) and making shit up and completely misrepresenting what I said. I was one of those young people who felt patronized and spoonfed crap, and this is happening at an even greater rate today. There's not a teenager with a brain cell alive who doesn't know who and what I was talking about.
You can also quit sucking up to teenagers yourself, you sanctimonious queef. This post wasn't about "providing alternatives." This was about slinging shit.
And yes, it did feel good, because I do love music and always have. It was what fueled me and kept my spirits up when I was young and alienated and stuck in miserable test-pattern suburbs with a bunch of spoiled assholes who worshipped and enshrined the brain-numbing monoculture of suburbia and didn't like what the world was offering. I still draw strength from it. Good music is spiritual nutrition, and like most nutrients, the young need it most.
Music can and should show us what we're really capable of; in sadness and discontent and angst and frustration it should show us we're not alone; it should help us feel defiant rather than beaten. It should be there to help us celebrate the milestones in our life. Like a river, like blood, music ought to carry what you need to the part of you that needs it, when you need it most. It should not stupefy, dispirit, corrupt, dull one's mind or blunt the soul.
I don't apologize to anyone for having this opinion, nor for the strident tone I've taken here.
"I hate a song that makes you think you're not any good. I hate a song that makes you think you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are either too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that...Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun of you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling. I am out to fight these kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down nor rolled over you, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and your work. And the songs I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you." - Woody Guthrie
You know, this is true. While overall I've never been a fan of Top 40 music, it's only in the last 7 or 8 years that I have not been interested in *anything at all* on the charts. Admittedly, I'm getting older (in my 30s now), but my disdain for what's out there now is not that I find the music necessarily "too loud and offensive for my early middle age years" or that I "don't get it" but that it is all...like product, barcoded, generic...I can't tell one band apart from the other. I can't remember the damn melodies from half the songs I hear. A minute after a song ends, if you asked me to hum it, I couldn't (there are some isolated exceptions).
I mean, it's like so many mediocre, flattened McDonalds hamburgers which have been left under heat lamps for an hour. I doubt this is the *full* reason why the industry suffers - I am pretty sure it's mainly piracy - but really, and I do think I'm being far, the stuff in top 40 now is the most generic, forgettable, all-sounds-the-same stuff I can recall in my lifetime.
I grew up in the 80s and I *hated* that. I hated most of the music but looking back, there was way more diversity even in synth-pop and crap like that, than there is in what people call emo today (I mention emo just because being white and middle class, this is supposed to appeal to me...or a younger version of me).
And let's not forget the aesthetic sewer hip hop and R&B is in. R&B was already dying in the early 80s, but rap had its golden age at the end of that decade, and has steadily declined since around 1993 or so, leaving what we have today - music so awful I am afraid to be in an elevator with a fan of it (not because I think they're bad-ass thugs, but because I think they must be barely sentient and might try to like, eat me or something, and not in the good way). And I'm not talking about underground/alternative rap - I'm talking about the top 40, "Hi I'm a big dumb idiot, I'm throwing money at the camera while a bunch of sluts dance behind me, all of which I'm going to have to pay the record company for, which will bankrupt me and launch me into obscurity back in the ghetto I came from."
There's obviously an audience for these albums and singles - really, really, really stupid teenagers. (Music execs like to say "teenagers" but what they mean are the dumbest of teenagers. Any of you reading this who are a teenager now and have to go through your teens in this culture have my utmost sympathy. And yes, it's as bad as you think it is.)
You know, what I really want is art and poetry; I want to be moved, like what I'm listening to *means something*. I want an emotional response, and if not that, then at bare minimum I want clever and quirky or even funny, but what's out there now doesn't even deliver *that*. I still pay attention to pop music because I am trying to understand why people listen to it. I understand why a bunch of posers out with their friends listen to it as a shared ritual of simian idiocy, but I don't get why I see these white boys driving around in pimped out hatchbacks listening to this shit when they don't *have* to? Do they not have a stash of like, real music to listen to when they don't have to pretend to like what everyone else likes? Are there really that many stupid, empty-eyed kids?
You know, I could chalk this up to a difference in aesthetics because clearly I probably listen to a lot of stuff other people really dislike, but in most cases I can *understand* why people would like something I'm not into (For example, I despise Nine Inch Nails, but I understand why someone would like its visceral energy). But I really don't understand why today's top 40 appeals to anyone at all. I can't abstractly understand why someone would like dickless tripe like AFI which the local Clear Channel stations just won't stop playing. This is an actual experience:
Me: "This is complete, crap, what is this, who would possibly like this, there's nothing here?" Wife: "It's AFI. You asked me the same question about this same s
That may be - I run emerge -uD world about once a week, but I've got a pretty decent broadband connection. In general, if people have the resources to do so, it is worthwhile to update at least once a fortnight. It's pretty clear that those who update infrequently (including those who don't update files in etc) tend to have more problems.
Beyond which, better to fix an issue or two here and there than face down 7 or 8 at once, which is more likely if you don't update often.
You know, I've read several articles online in the last few months which suggest serious problems with Gentoo. But I think it's important to consider the fact that, from my personal perspective and in my own experience, I have had less issues in the last 6 months with Gentoo (except for a hardware failure on one of my main hard drive), than I have had in all the time I've used Gentoo. My system right now is also running more unstable packages than I've ever run, and this is all in amd64.
I admit that I'd stick with Gentoo even if, from my perspective as a user, it was going through a hard time, but on my (KDE desktop) system, which is the main system I use for just about everything, if I didn't read these articles, I would have no idea that anything was going wrong.
I have spent less time maintaining, fixing, or otherwise bringing my system up to date in the last few months than I have in years.
As for interpersonal politics, lack of diplomacy, and immoderate language, I don't think that's anything unique to Gentoo. It may well be that there are some cultural issues which need addressing - not for me to say - and perhaps the departure of key developers may, in the future, affect the user's experience, but for me, this has not yet been the case.
I like Gentoo a lot - in fact, I wound up running it sort of by mistake. As a newcomer to Linux, I'd read (in late 2001) that the Gentoo install was some kind of baptism of fire. I had problems understanding some of the fundamentals of how Linux systems are set up and at the time my Mandrake install was not helping me learn. I installed Gentoo as a lark, with the idea that I might learn some things about Linux that I could apply to Mandrake (which I was running because everyone said, at the time, that it was a great distribution for beginners).
Having gotten it installed on the first try, without any problems whatsoever, I ran it for a little while. Then I fell in love with portage which was - at the time - more reliable than Mandrake's package manager. After a few weeks, I couldn't find a reason to go back to Mandrake. This was just a few months in, after years of being a Windows user (which is why I also take issue with the popular assertion that Gentoo isn't for beginners, because it was ideal for me).
In the time since, I've tried several distributions and use Debian on my router and my file server, because they're old, crotchety machines that I was too lazy to install Gentoo on. But I've yet to find anything which so closely matches my expectation of how my system should work, than Gentoo. Which is why I'd stick with it (that and 5 years of momentum, of course).
For me, Gentoo is about ease of use, and specifically *not* having to spend a lot of time keeping my system up to date. In no way am I suggesting that the assertions of others that "Gentoo is too much work" are invalid, but they certainly have nothing to do with my experience, or that of many other Gentoo users. As for compiling software (for instance), this is a process I run, background, and forget about. Every few months, something a little more involved might require an hour or so of my attention (a major GCC upgrade, for instance) but overall, maintaining my system is simply not a time sink, at all.
And no, I'm not a developer. A computer hobbyist and fan of computers, but hardly some kind of guru. There may be good reasons not to use Gentoo, but I'd hate for anyone to think that these political spats somehow define the distribution or have much to do with the user's experience.
At least, it doesn't, so far, have anything to do with *me*. I still recommend Gentoo wholeheartedly. I have a lot of affection for it. I can and have used other distributions and I could learn to live with just about any distribution if I had to, but I doubt it would be the complete pleasure that Gentoo has been. I don't have hatred for any of the distributions I've tried out (Debian, OpenSuSE, Mandrake, Fedora, Slackware, Kubuntu, and FreeBSD as well), bu
If there is one ugly human pathology I would like to see snuffed out in my lifetime, it is the worship of the state, the tendency to equate states with nations, and the reverence, reification, or deification of political figures.
As to whether or not the State is a necessary evil, that is still, quite obviously, a subject for debate.
But I look forward to a day when mankind - possibly - outgrows the need for the State, and with it, the cults of personality, nationalism, genocide, hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness, and tyranny that are its most toxic products.
Censorship is a sickness, wherever it occurs. Enlightened people the world over need to unite in common cause against it. No one should be able to decide *for you*, what you should read. No state should behave as if it were a parent to its citizens.
States - and their crimes - not only victimize us, but divide us as well. I am not my government. I would hope most people the world over would make this statement with the same conviction that I do.
I am an open advocate of civilization, cooperation, and the decent treatment of other human beings in the world. I am not enamored with lowercase-a anarchy, in the sense of "disorder" - but as the years go by, I am also faced with another realization, and that is that the State is good for one thing; it has only one useful purpose - as something to be dragged down, and, possibly, spat upon in contempt as an exercise in the assertion of individual sovereignty, and, in the case of censorship, the independence of the mind of the individual.
Words are ideas, and those who seek, through censorship, to control ideas, intend to control minds.
Not your friend. Not mine, not anyone's. The ideal response is open defiance, but that's easy for me to say, living thousands of miles away.
Until it happens here, the next go-around. And it will. It does. It always does.
I'm not Armenian or Turkish or Greek; so I have no specific axe to grind at all, except to say that this site, referenced in a previous reply as some sort of "evidence" against the genocide, is pathetic:
Within 3 paragraphs, it builds the same kind of "they have wealth and power and control information" conspiracy bullshit in the same way anti-Semitic literature does, and then makes this remarkable statement:
"Turks characteristically shun propaganda, and have chosen not to dwell on the tragedies of the past, forging ahead to build upon brotherhood."
That may be true of most Turks, but I have my doubts about the guy publishing this site. Not much brotherhood in that website.
Armenians in the United States, at least, are not a large ethnic group.
"As descendants of the merchant class from the Ottoman Empire, Armenians have been successful in acquiring the wealth and power to make their voices heard... and they have made good use of the "Christian" connection to gain the sympathies of Westerners who share their religion and prejudices."
Is utterly ridiculous. Absurd. Most Americans, I'd wager, have never even heard of the Armenian genocide, or find Armenia (or Turkey for that matter) on a map. I'm not proud of this, but this statement rings like a total fabrication in light of it. As for the other Western nations, I cannot say - I hope they know more about this than I assume most Americans do, but I find it hard to believe that Europeans, for instance, are "just making crap up" to fuck with Turkey.
Either a genocide happened or it did not. Almost to this day, some people expect Germans to continue to apologize for the Holocaust (which is ridiculous and insulting to the generations during and since who have contributed dramatically to the human rights cause and freedom around the world), but the way Germany has dealt with this event in their history (and continues to deal with it) provides an interesting contrast to the way that countries like Turkey (if these comments are representative of the prevalent attitudes in Turkey - I honestly do not know if they are, so I do not mean to impugn all of Turkey) and Cambodia have dealt with theirs.
*Everyone's shit stinks, including Turkey's.* I know, my own country is right now run by monkeys hurling more than their fair of shit - a display of excess so quintessential to the United States. We also have our unfortunate and shameful legacy of slavery and racism and genocide of the American Indians - something pointed at by the stupid website above - and one thing we do not do - most of us, anyway - is deny it. At least, no one I know does. It is part of our legacy, and who we are. We may not have done enough in penance for these sins - I'm the first to admit it - but no one denies that it happened, and that many of our ancestors - relatives - were responsible for it. There is a statue in the center of Santa Fe - a monument, I forget to who - some cowboy - which talks about how he "battled Indian savages". Not only was the word savages ground off of the statue, but a memorial plaque acknowledging our shit treatment of people who owned that land was placed on it as well. A pittance of a gesture, but at least an acknowledgement of it, and anyone who visits the park in the middle of Santa Fe will reflect on what happened where they're standing. The statue is an example of a nation coming to terms - to some degree - with its unsavory past. Acknowledgement alone isn't enough, but it's the first step.
Wikipedia has a map of who recognizes this as genocide, and who does not, hence my comment on Europeans since much of Europe recognizes it:
Ever since I moved to Arizona, I've enjoyed the luxury of actual access to a local dump. I lived in a place where there was - so far as I know - no public access to landfills; you had to pay some licensed, mobbed up company to dump anything you wanted to.
Here in Southern Arizona, I pay $9.00 to enter with a pickup truck-load of garbage.
As you enter, to the left, there is a fairly postapocalyptic-looking pile where people can dump refrigerators, stoves, and other appliances - and only those things.
There is an area for dumping oil and paint with large barrels for that purpose.
And then there's a big storage container - the kind you can get on to a tractor trailer - where computer stuff can be dumped. I've often been tempted to scavenge stuff from here but I realize that I don't actually *need* any more spare stuff lying around, which is a weird realization. But I wonder where that stuff goes - the website indicates that it is recycled, but not where.
The pit itself, where you'd dump everything else, is interesting. You drive down and just dump stuff on the ground which feels...naughty. Then, these extremely large tractors come by and plow everything under the dirt, so that each day when you go there, you only see a day's worth of trash.
This contrasts to stuff I've always seen on television with massive piles of unsorted garbage stacked up a story high or more.
For computer equipment, I keep stacking it in my garage as I acquire or want to dispose of dead monitors, old computer parts, and so on. Once per year, around Christmas, I drive down to the dump, pay my $9.00, and dump all of it at once into that storage container allocated for computer equipment.
If you just dump computer stuff in your regular trash, you may want to go to your local landfill's website, and see if they have
Not sure I know which quote you're talking about. This one, maybe:
"Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix,"
Like I made clear, I've been running this for 5 years for its pure utility. Whether or not Microsoft has resorted to more dicketry than usual, is irrelevant as to my choice to run it from here on out. I started using it because I wanted a decent command line; in my case, what made me switch wasn't Windows's poor security record (*I* didn't have this problem. I ran a firewall and virus scanner.), or its price, or some kind of ideological objection to commercial software.
What made me switch was the way the command line withered in Windows. Or perhaps it was more, the emphasis on the command line by Linux and operating systems like it. I was using a lot of UNIX re-writes in batch files - DOS versions of UNIX command line mailers (Don't recall which), I think some kind of grep utility, and so on. After awhile, it became clear that it was silly to be doing this when I could just get the whole environment I needed by running Linux (didn't know much about BSD at the time, but it might just as well have been that - to this day, my use of Linux is more out of habit than actually preferring it to, say, FreeBSD.
Is this a "love of UNIX?" I wouldn't put it that way but I guess it is roughly equivalent.
I didn't even know how much I should have been running Linux (or a BSD) all along, until I switched. I bought a very cheap Celeron kit from Tiger Direct for the purpose of "messing around with Linux" on and perhaps doing the command line things I wanted to do on that system as an adjunct to my graphical environment in Windows (I didn't know about Cygwin, or if it was even around then).
What happened was, the first distribution I installed was Mandrake, and I got to using KDE through that (just to play with) and quickly realized that there was no reason to be using Windows anymore, for anything. I kept my Windows 2000 system around awhile, until it fell into disuse and got powered down. Recently I wiped it and put Linux on it to use as a container for hard drives (a backup server.)
I regretted buying such a cheap kit to run it on, but I didn't seriously consider running Linux as my main desktop when I bought it. After all, people were making the point left and right that as great it was as a server, it just "wasn't ready for the desktop."
I recently replaced that Tiger Direct kit with a homebuilt Core 2 Duo. Linux is, as I have pointed out to others, ready for *my* desktop and has been for awhile. I hear a lot of complaints, but I've been working for 5 years on a Linux desktop.
I cannot say whether or not it is ready or appropriate for others' desktops. If it were, I think more people would be running it; but for me it does the job and has for years.
This spite I speak of, merely puts some butter on the the nourishing all-natural, whole wheat bread that Linux has been for me. That was my point.
If it's another quote in that article you're referencing, let me know. I still have to run Windows at work - I have no choice in the matter - I don't gnash my teeth over it, but it certainly isn't my preference, on the basis of the experience alone. Still, I can be fairly productive in Windows so long as I'm just using native applications. And I can even string little hacks together using those aforementioned Windows ports I mentioned, but if I have the option to run Linux or a BSD, why bother?
I suppose if I was a gamer I might have some more to say about Windows and Linux - to me playing Windows games via WINE or virtualization or emulation or whatever in Linux is much the same thing in reverse - better to just get a second machine and run Windows on it for games. For me, personally, that is. (That being said, I do enjoy a little distraction of bzflag from time to time).
Props though, to the BSDs as well. I have no compelling reason to run FreeBSD but if I had to, I'd
In a way we should be thanking Ballmer. A lot of people run Linux now and the thrill of simply putting it on one's machine is long gone.
Ballmer's comments, and the presumable legal action which will follow them in the future, lets us feel like outlaws, non-conformists, and rebels again. SCO was never really a thrilling nemesis
SCO is...well...SCO is...pathetic.
I never really had that thrill of running something as unlikely as Linux; by the time I got it installed (2001), it was pretty popular, installers had made it simple, and it wasn't a big deal. But now, not only will my 5 years of Linux usage be a functional and utilitarian experience (which is the sum total of what it has been thus far)-- but also one of spite and defiance going forward.
I enjoy spite and defiance. Don't you? I'd rather be dragging down kings and military regimes, but this will do as a small snack in my comfortable suburban kitchen.
A small thrill, but it feels good, nonetheless.
I can't be the only one who felt *good* to be a Linux user when I read this.
The chances of me downgrading to something like Vista were null to begin with, but now, well...
The only thing I have to say about Windows is, well, bitch if I need to, I'll run your OS in a *window*.
They're more than slightly larger, in my experience...(than photos)
Still for little web glyphs, logos and so on, it's nice to not have to sweat Microsoft's...inexcusable...lack of support for PNG transparency anymore.
If you think about it, it's kind of annoying really. Microsoft kills Netscape, owns the browser market, then, once all major competitors have been trashed, they let their own browser rot without tabs, and without proper PNG support...for years.
I saw an article somewhere, some time ago, that the new IE 7 properly deals with transparency in PNGs (Don't run Windows so I haven't been able to test this). Though I'm pretty sure by now that format is cursed, in a mystical and supernatural way, and people will refuse to use no matter what holes it fills.
Not that it's up to me, but I think whatever party can guarantee in the most absolute terms, with the greatest accountability, should have control over whatever infrastructure needs to be in control of a government agency.
In particular, I'd endorse any group which:
(*) Will not discriminate (thereby censoring) on the basis of fear of explicit sexuality (Looking at you, USA).
(*) Will not discriminate (thereby censoring) on the basis of unpopular political or social views (Racism, nationalism (including the worst sort of Nazism), fascism, anarchism, communism - insert yours here) (Looking at you, Germany, China, some others). I can decide for myself what's offensive, dangerous, or bunk. Don't want any government making that decision for me. Don't really want anyone involved in governing any aspect of the internet who doesn't understand why it's a paradox to use authoritarian tactics and policies to prevent authoritarianism. I don't need authoritarian tactics to be used to protect myself from cults, either (China - Falun Gong). And I sure as hell don't need any governmental organization, should this (god forbid) happen, telling me not to read something like Al Jazeera. If your own population can't resist going all screwy in the head because it is exposed to certain kinds of expression, you are *not qualified* for this job, as a country.
(*) Will not discriminate (thereby censoring) on the basis of language or insist on any kind of language requirement. I'm all for working on better internationalization of domain names (I don't understand much about this, but I've read other posts and I'm all for domains in other character sets, to the extent this is possible, technologically).
(*) Will not attempt to levy taxes on any individual, except as is necessary to fund, non-profit, the physical maintenance of root servers and so on (Looking at you, governments of the world, some more than others).
(*) Will not attempt to discriminate (thereby censoring) on the basis of religion, for or against. Falun Gong, radical hate-filled Wahhabist (whatever term you use for the cult wing of Islam) rants against my own country, the USA - I'll make my own decision on what to read and what I think about it.
(*) Will not attempt intellectual property voodoo or otherwise exercise power over websites with controversial (in some governments) approach to intellectual property. These questions and issues - piracy and so on - need to be dealt with outside of the realm of DNS, domain ownership, and so on.
Any group which can guarantee *not* to do any of these gets my vote.
Domain names need to be *cheap*, *registered without discrimination or censorship concerns*, and every domain owner must have a reasonable set of rights that ensure that domain's accessibility by all locations on the globe. Frankly, just because this is so fundamental to freedom of speech, I don't even think domain names should be taxed - anywhere on the globe.
I'm tired of these pissing contests about which government is least bad. All governments are bad. The one which is most powerful and offensive today, will eventually fade as all empires do, and another will take its place. It's not enough to simply resist certain governments, *today*. There are no governments in the world, nor in history, that couldn't use more shackles, more limits, more checks - there are no politicians or political enforcers who couldn't stand to live in more fear and paranoia of the citizens they claim to represent.
If I can get iron-clad guarantees, enforceability, accountability, and so on, I will support whatever organization or entity guarantees me maximal rights.
But I am unwilling (such that my opinion matters at all) to subject such a system to so-called "democracy" or the means by which one party shoves its sensibilities down the throat of others (I am sorry, but I do not give a shit whatsoever about France's language issues, Germany's bizarre issues with neo-Nazism and free expression, or my own govern
"If there's a kernel of what you believe at the heart of your trolling, consider the difference between 'reasoning' and 'believing', and that there's a vast middle ground between two extremes. Rejecting Stallman's dogma doesn't imply that you've got to blindly adhere to another, any more than rejecting Scientology implies you've got to go become a Jehova's Witness."
My point is that accepting Stallman's point of view doesn't automatically make you "irrational" either. What annoys me isn't that people are critics of Stallman's point of view - that's fair enough and I have some questions myself - but there's this phony air of legitimacy many critics of Stallman have, like their point of view is somehow self-evident, and that Stallman fans are like cult members or something because only someone completely..high...would buy into his point of view.
I hate this. When I was in college, I had political views which clashed with the dominant ideology of others in my major - the response to my objections were rarely reasoned responses, but "c'mon, who are you kidding?" and not much more. I hate the fact that there are always whole sets of ideas and modes of thinking that I am expected to take for granted as obvious and true, when they're not.
Many - not all, but many - opponents of Stallman take this same basic point of view. I guarantee that I can find a counterpoint for you, who insists that their take on economics or political theory or what have you has been "rigorously analyzed" using "science" and so forth. All of my life, I've been around ideologues all over the political spectrum who have insisted to me that theirs is the only sober, rational point of view, and they have mountains of books, dissertations, and theories to prove it...Mutually contradictory parties making the exact same claim.
Stallman fans annoy me in ways other than this for the most part, in part because they know that they're fighting an uphill battle in a way, especially in the United States, where I live, and which historically has less sympathy for noncommercial or anticommercial ventures than - if what I read on the internet is to be believed - other places.
"As for brands, if you were talking about the ongoing Linux versus Windows (or Linux versus whatever) debates, you could rather easily draw a parallel with car brands. What's different about Stallman's acolytes is their obsessive focus on the supposed 'morality' of their ideology, and their droning on about 'freedom', implying that anyone who doesn't agree with them is 'immoral', and 'anti-freedom'. It's that mindset that pushes Stallmanism into the realm of being a cult. (Supporters of 'open source', in contrast, tend to approach the subject rationally, even if some are a bit strange.)"
It's fair enough to disagree that software licenses have much to do with morality (in fact, I don't really buy the Stallman position on this myself - not yet anyway), but I understand why *they* think it is. If you accept share and share-alike as a basic moral premise as many people do - including many on the left, some Christians, and so on - then their point of view makes sense; this would just be an extension of anything else in their outlook. I used to hang around with people who didn't think charity was a virtue. I understood why, given the rest of their philosophy - I even shared it for awhile. Later, when I moved on, I didn't necessary buy it anymore but I acknowledge even today that it is compatible with, and logically flows from, deeper principles these folks have.
I don't have the same obsessions as Stallman does about closed up, proprietary software. I'm not from his generation or his era, and things actually worked in the reverse for me - I started using computers when almost everything was commercial, and only later, did Stallman's "unworkable," "utopian," "pie in the sky," license suddenly present a real alternative to the commercial slop I was using (Linux; I was a Windows user from 1995 until 2002, DOS before that, an
"Do you suppose that people who get bent out of shape by the nonsense spewn by Scientologists actually view L. Ron Hubbard as having been some sort of god? Hardly. The reason Stallman stirs up so much interest is because to a lot of people his ideas are self-evidently ludicrous, but like any cult leader, he has a band of fanatical followers who take anything he says as the absolute truth, seemingly unable to consider it rationally."
It's a lot more like Ford and Chevy fans warring against each other with retaliatory (Calvin pissing on the logo of the other guy's truck manufacturer) stickers. Let's maintain some perspective here, until and unless we see the genesis of a Stallmanite Sea Org Equivalent, where everyone involved signs on for a billion years (the predicted time until a workable HURD release), and has a huge beard. Until then, let's just recognize this debate for what it is, a distraction from things that really matter like war and death and pizza and fucking and stuff.
"It's also, to be honest, interesting to argue with fanatics, to see how they respond to reasoned arguments. Typically, slashbots who adhere to Stallmanism reply by accusing anyone who disagrees with them of being 'an M$ shill', as if they think a childish rejoinder negates reasoned argument. Alternatively, they may ignore the uncomfortable argument altogether (but sometimes still reply, by setting up a strawman, knocking it over and pretending that this has somehow destroyed the argument that upsets them)."
I'm not disagreeing with you some some "adherents of Stallmanism" certainly do exactly what you describe, but then again, I do so enjoy the phony sanctimonious pragmatism - the "Let me tell you how the REAL WORLD is...HIPPIE!" admonitions of the opposition as well. Shit stinks all over both sides of this debate, frankly. But that's what I love about it. And by love, I mean hate, really. And by hate I mean, "am really bored with but keep reading anyway for reasons I don't understand, where I then post long rambling messages about how silly people who post long rambling messages about this subject are."
"At the end of the day, the fact that fanatical zealots who follow a cult leader are able to upset people doesn't mean their cult leader is right, is a god or anything like that. No, it's their decision to give up all attempts at thinking for themselves, and accept all of their leader's pronouncements as truth, that interests people. To thinking individuals, this sort of thing is indeed quite interesting, but also profoundly disturbing."
Well first, my post was intended as humorous provocation - and not a serious declaration about anything. But second of all, I wanted to thank you for supplying the sanctimoniousness here for balance - you being a "thinking individual" and all, unlike those Stallmanite clams with the e-meters you speak of.
"I wouldn't say Stallman is irrelevant or insane (for that matter, L. Ron Hubbard certainly wasn't irrelevant, and probably wasn't insane either). Stallman was a decent programmer (though he mostly only copied existing software),"
I think the first step in coming to any kind of common ground here is to make the point that in 2006, Stallman's software contributions - by which I mean software that he, himself, has written, his skills as a programmer, etc - are irrelevant to the discussion entirely, unless you're the kind of person who likes to discuss, oh, Klingon metaphysics, the "selling out" of the trance party scene, and/or the sociological ramifications of tentacle rape hentai (just as examples).
The debate is fundamentally about the GPL and whether or not:
(a) It restricts freedom by prohibiting the closing up of source code. (b) It increases freedom by prohibiting the closing up of source code.
And just to maintain the sort of noble traditions established by, oh, the abortion debate, it is really crucially important here that people talk right past each other, complicate matt
Considering the number of people who consider Stallman irrelevant, heavy-handed, dogmatic, insane, and so on, who still take valuable time out of their day to bitch and whine about him every time there's an article about him, I'd say you're right. Never has someone so "irrelevant" attracted so many long, bile-filed posts expounding on his irrelevance, dogmatism, and so on.
Inside every critic of Stallman you've ever read on Slashdot or sites like it, is a crazed, wild-eyed fanboy. Nothing else can possibly explain the amount of effort that has gone into commenting on him. People who are irrelevant aren't written about, quoted, smeared, and attacked as often as Stallman is.
Face it, all of you: The man is a God. Your god. And the more you profess to hate him the more we know you have a serious crush on him. Don't bother denying it.
You, who never hesitates to write about how much you supposedly dislike Stallman - you just want to bury your face in his considerable mane, where you'll feel...safe...and warm, and you'll never want to let go.
They're thinking, "And to think, many light years away, people are having serious discussions about how horrible and ravaging a debilitating WoW habits can be."
This is actually key - and not just subversive marketing but marketing in general. My own mental habit when watching television - and this is automatic; I couldn't *stop* thinking this way - is to sort of "remote view" the conversations in the advertising agency, and then reduce the commercial down to its essential elements:
"Lifestyle. If I don't own this, I'm not cool."
"Buy this and it will get me laid." (I salute the various body spray ads using this technique so nakedly, it was probably considered risky when first proposed - it's one thing to subtly add sexual imagery to commercials - it's another to just make a naked claim that a product will get you laid. And it's worked. Which says very little for the modern 18-24 year old male, frankly.)
Then I picture the imagery the agency decides on, the song choice, and how it was conceived, laboratory style, to try to manipulate me.
I apply the same mental circuits to religion, ideology, and so on.
When this mental process becomes automatic, the desire to consume drops significantly because it generally makes me feel somewhat insulted - the usually cheap, manipulative nature of advertising and so on. Even great advertising is pretty bad if you break it down to its calculated, constituent parts.
As Rosco P. Coltrane (how's Flash doing btw?) mentions, it's increasingly necessary to be aware of these things whenever you expose yourself to any kind of retail environment, for the reasons he lists.
Lastly, avoid retail environments altogether unless you specifically want to buy a certain product.
It's hard for me to get wound up about consumer culture because it really requires only a few easily-learned habits to innoculate yourself against it. Like anyone else, I buy products, but I research, especially higher-end items, to the point of analysis paralysis, before putting my money down. I take a shopping list with me to the supermarket.
Sheriff Little of Chickasaw county agrees, btw.
The smell of bread or cookies or whatever, will probably initially cause this thought: "mmmm cookies."
The immediate second thought should be, "How cheap and insulting."
Authoritarianism, fraud, and a country which confuses comfort for freedom (while ranting about freedom endlessly), is the explanation you're looking for. Add to it graft, corruption, and influence of companies like Diebold, and you'll get fries with that as well.
I'm not sure your post is fair. Despite the problems you list, free operating systems have come *this* far. There are quite a few very usable, (in fact, some quite polished) linux distributions which have been developed by volunteers.
Whatever Gentoo's organizational problems, no one should get the idea that the distro itself is falling apart. Frankly, if I didn't see stories like this, as a Gentoo user, I wouldn't know something was seriously wrong.
I assume you were using hyperbole when you said that Gentoo packages were broken "half of the time." Well, I just re-emerged world - that's every package on my system, because I'd updated to a new gcc version.
The results were 6 out of 743 packages didn't compile. When I tried to compile them again, 2 worked, leaving 4 out of 740 packages with problems - not exactly a disaster; that's just over half of a percent broken packages.
This was approximately the same as on my other Gentoo box which uses a different arch (the above is x86_64, this other one is x86).
This has been my experience consistently - would I like a 100% working stable branch? Yes. It's worth working toward. Is my system an unstable shambles? On average I reboot every 60 days or so when I upgrade my kernel. I wouldn't call that...rickety.
You call a decade and a half (speaking of Linux) of volunteer Linux development "This quaint social experiment of altruistic development"?
I'm sorry, but I have disagree - that is a seriously skewed perspective. If I read your post, I would conclude that Linux hadn't risen above, oh, MS-DOS in terms of usability and sophistication.
I've been using a Gentoo Linux desktop for 5 years and Debian production servers at work for three. I don't mean to suggest I'm an expert, but I do have a fair amount of experience with these "quaint social experiments," and it could be that you're just letting off some steam, but if not, I find it hard to agree with your assessment of the situation.
In my opinion the reality is that the volunteer development process is (and always has been) imperfect, and can probably be improved - in fact, this model has been around long enough that now is a good time for a re-assement of social dynamics of such a system.
Nor is it purely altruistic - developing software (I assume) gives a volunteer developer a sense of personal satisfaction, credibility, esteem from others, and even something to put on a resume. Users could stand to be a tad more courteous and grateful to developers, this much is true, and I don't want to speak for developers but I find it hard to believe they consider themselves religious clerics slavishly serving users out of some sense of self-sacrifice. I am personally deeply thankful for their efforts. Perhaps some developers could add to this discussion in terms of their motivations.
People have really been unfair to the GPL, volunteer developers, and so on - immoderate and sometimes mean-spirited in their criticism. Let's not forget what this "quaint social experiment" has in fact yielded. I know - I use products of that process every day.
I hope people smarter at social dynamics and project management than I am can improve the process, but, well, Gentoo and Debian work for me, professionally and as a hobbyist.
To suggest that this system is some kind of a lark or failure simply contradicts the basic reality of the situation. I'm surprised you feel as you do, as I assume by your post that you use or have used one or several free UNIX-like OSes. Your assessment of the situation could not be further from my own.
Lastly, and I'll be a bit of a broken record with this, Gentoo is not for everyone. It is not intended as a side-by-side replacement to something like SLED though with some work it can certainly work that way. Gentoo is for tinkerers, developers, and people who are interested in the OS itself, rather than simply what can be accomplished with the OS. It's definitely for me but I don't think less of anyone who couldn't be bothered with Gentoo.
If anything, I hope to see the problems addressed simply so life will be easier on developers, and encourage them to stick around (and new ones to contribute).
I am curious how many people use this as their main distro, and how they got there. I have yet to run into a single person who has settled on this. Hell, I've barely even run into anyone interested in trying it.
So if anyone is reading this and does use this as their main distro, I'm curious why you use it, and what you tried before it.
Because I'm just not clear on the point of this distribution. Looking at free (as in beer) Linux distributions like OpenSuSE and *buntu, I just don't understand why anyone would pay for this.
Paying for home desktop Linux just strikes me as....bizarre....Unless there is some significant advantage to this distribution, but honestly looking at YaST, I don't understand how much easier it needs to get. I'm sort of surprised this distribution is still around. Is the company profitable?
(And no, I'm not a SuSE user, but I've played with it.)
Someone step in and drop some science on this please.
And this is the reason for IVRs. The company wants you *not* to call because support costs are high. In any situation where there is online servicing, the company wants you to use that instead.
Phone support is expensive. IVRs are there as much to to sour people on the idea of calling at all as they are to properly direct calls.
Infuriating as this is (and crappy as it can sometimes be), it is amazing the routine crap people will wait on hold for 20 minutes for, not to mention the time they spend navigating the IVR, when they could have gotten their answer in 30 seconds by just going to the website.
I think this situation sucks most for people who do not have an internet connection or are calling for support for a downed internet connection.
Since most companies use IVRs now, it's not as if having a labyrinthine phone system will drive customers away (what competitors don't have that?). What needs to happen is for consumers to change their mindset about support and be willing to pay extra for it, while at the same time, online support mechanisms (including live agent chat) need to be improved. The alternative is for the whole industry to up the cost to consumers for goods and services to provide for more robust phone support. That's not going to happen because consumers will live with just about anything. One thing consumers will not abide by is inconvenience, regardless of the cost, and for example, switching ISPs (when that's even a reasonable alternative - in the US, many areas are completely monopolized by one or two companies, broadband-wise) is a serious inconvenience.
It's like how people bitch about Windows but still buy it either explicitly by forking money over, or paying the Microsoft tax when they buy a computer. Or how a lot of people complain about Wal-Mart, and shop there anyway. Likewise, companies with crap support - including infuriating IVRs, well, the frustration of that wears off fairly quickly.
Phone support is a cost - a drag on profits, a necessary evil at best, as far as most companies are concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
Want better support?
Pay an extra $5 a month for your service.
Pay CSRs better to retain them for longer so that they become more and more skilled.
Call centers have massive turnover rates because frankly, the job kind of sucks. Bizarre shifts, sometimes extremely long shifts, and crap pay, depending on where you work. Customer service is something everyone complains about. A little more respect for reps would help a lot. Make it into a worthy career, and maybe people will stick around. Provide break time and ample vacation. Provide benefits. Encourage people to stay in the position for several years and become skilled at whatever it is they are supporting, rather than using the job as a stepping stone to other things. One skilled, experienced rep is probably better than 3 or 4 clueless new hires. In time, these reps should become coaches to new hires. People with generic management skills are *not*, simply by nature of having managed people, qualified to be a team leader in a call center. Handling even the most technical of technical support calls can be 50% psychology. It's not necessarily even that your problem is fixed, but that you leave happy and maintain your service.
But if you want bargain basement prices, that's where they're going to cut corners. It is where they have always cut corners. They're not going to cut the salaries and benefits of the executive officers in the company to save cash; that's for sure.
Don't take your frustration out on the reps. They've been dealing with upset, and sometimes childishly rude customers all day. As reps are bottom on the corporate totem pole, they have little influence over anything. Perhaps they are lucky and have a progressive management that listens to them. Probably not. They are probably underpaid or outright exploited contractors whose performance is based on metrics that have little to do with how happy you actually are, except to the extent that you affect the bottom line in some significant way.
If you get poor service, complain to the top. If a CSR is downright rude, mention them by name. They need to be disciplined or terminated. If you're ticked off about the service, spare the CSR, because it will be easier to fire the CSR than make systemic changes to the way the call center is managed (which may include things like training.)
I assume the Slashdot crowd here uses online "self servicing" before calling. Know that many people don't. Know that many people choose to engage in a 45 minute call (including hold time and navigating VRUs) rather than take 5 minutes to do a search on the website. The hold times you are experiencing may be a result of customers like this (and obviously, yes, if you're talking about an ISP, some people can't get online to use self-servicing, but you'd be surprised how many people are simply lazy).
10% of customers are simply unprofitable due to the havoc they wreak on their own computers, and the number of times they call technical support. Many customers will attempt to disguise problems they themselves caused, as a problem with the service whose tech support line they are calling. For example, a customer downloads malware which screws their system up. They will call and say that "your software" did this to their system and you damn well better help. Or it's Microsoft's problem, or some other piece of software they insist on running is interfering with your product.
Customers expect reps to be experts on every piece of software, OS, and possible configuration. I've seen people call reps "morons" because they don't know how to support FreeBSD or obscure desktop-altering applications on their $7.50 an hour salaries.
Sometimes CSRs are bastards because they've been dealing with childish jerks all day. Some CSRs are incompetent, or ill-tempered and don't belong on a company's front lines, but this is probably the exception rather than the rule. There are many reasons for bad customer service, but most of it has to do with shortcuts take
You should try actually reading my post, wherein I specifically talk about *dumb teenagers* and then address the ones who are not, rather than "just skimming" (your words) and making shit up and completely misrepresenting what I said. I was one of those young people who felt patronized and spoonfed crap, and this is happening at an even greater rate today. There's not a teenager with a brain cell alive who doesn't know who and what I was talking about.
You can also quit sucking up to teenagers yourself, you sanctimonious queef. This post wasn't about "providing alternatives." This was about slinging shit.
And yes, it did feel good, because I do love music and always have. It was what fueled me and kept my spirits up when I was young and alienated and stuck in miserable test-pattern suburbs with a bunch of spoiled assholes who worshipped and enshrined the brain-numbing monoculture of suburbia and didn't like what the world was offering. I still draw strength from it. Good music is spiritual nutrition, and like most nutrients, the young need it most.
Music can and should show us what we're really capable of; in sadness and discontent and angst and frustration it should show us we're not alone; it should help us feel defiant rather than beaten. It should be there to help us celebrate the milestones in our life. Like a river, like blood, music ought to carry what you need to the part of you that needs it, when you need it most. It should not stupefy, dispirit, corrupt, dull one's mind or blunt the soul.
I don't apologize to anyone for having this opinion, nor for the strident tone I've taken here.
"I hate a song that makes you think you're not any good. I hate a song that makes you think you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are either too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that...Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun of you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling. I am out to fight these kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down nor rolled over you, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and your work. And the songs I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you." - Woody Guthrie
You know, this is true. While overall I've never been a fan of Top 40 music, it's only in the last 7 or 8 years that I have not been interested in *anything at all* on the charts. Admittedly, I'm getting older (in my 30s now), but my disdain for what's out there now is not that I find the music necessarily "too loud and offensive for my early middle age years" or that I "don't get it" but that it is all...like product, barcoded, generic...I can't tell one band apart from the other. I can't remember the damn melodies from half the songs I hear. A minute after a song ends, if you asked me to hum it, I couldn't (there are some isolated exceptions).
I mean, it's like so many mediocre, flattened McDonalds hamburgers which have been left under heat lamps for an hour. I doubt this is the *full* reason why the industry suffers - I am pretty sure it's mainly piracy - but really, and I do think I'm being far, the stuff in top 40 now is the most generic, forgettable, all-sounds-the-same stuff I can recall in my lifetime.
I grew up in the 80s and I *hated* that. I hated most of the music but looking back, there was way more diversity even in synth-pop and crap like that, than there is in what people call emo today (I mention emo just because being white and middle class, this is supposed to appeal to me...or a younger version of me).
And let's not forget the aesthetic sewer hip hop and R&B is in. R&B was already dying in the early 80s, but rap had its golden age at the end of that decade, and has steadily declined since around 1993 or so, leaving what we have today - music so awful I am afraid to be in an elevator with a fan of it (not because I think they're bad-ass thugs, but because I think they must be barely sentient and might try to like, eat me or something, and not in the good way). And I'm not talking about underground/alternative rap - I'm talking about the top 40, "Hi I'm a big dumb idiot, I'm throwing money at the camera while a bunch of sluts dance behind me, all of which I'm going to have to pay the record company for, which will bankrupt me and launch me into obscurity back in the ghetto I came from."
There's obviously an audience for these albums and singles - really, really, really stupid teenagers. (Music execs like to say "teenagers" but what they mean are the dumbest of teenagers. Any of you reading this who are a teenager now and have to go through your teens in this culture have my utmost sympathy. And yes, it's as bad as you think it is.)
You know, what I really want is art and poetry; I want to be moved, like what I'm listening to *means something*. I want an emotional response, and if not that, then at bare minimum I want clever and quirky or even funny, but what's out there now doesn't even deliver *that*. I still pay attention to pop music because I am trying to understand why people listen to it. I understand why a bunch of posers out with their friends listen to it as a shared ritual of simian idiocy, but I don't get why I see these white boys driving around in pimped out hatchbacks listening to this shit when they don't *have* to? Do they not have a stash of like, real music to listen to when they don't have to pretend to like what everyone else likes? Are there really that many stupid, empty-eyed kids?
You know, I could chalk this up to a difference in aesthetics because clearly I probably listen to a lot of stuff other people really dislike, but in most cases I can *understand* why people would like something I'm not into (For example, I despise Nine Inch Nails, but I understand why someone would like its visceral energy). But I really don't understand why today's top 40 appeals to anyone at all. I can't abstractly understand why someone would like dickless tripe like AFI which the local Clear Channel stations just won't stop playing. This is an actual experience:
Me: "This is complete, crap, what is this, who would possibly like this, there's nothing here?"
Wife: "It's AFI. You asked me the same question about this same s
That may be - I run emerge -uD world about once a week, but I've got a pretty decent broadband connection. In general, if people have the resources to do so, it is worthwhile to update at least once a fortnight. It's pretty clear that those who update infrequently (including those who don't update files in etc) tend to have more problems.
Beyond which, better to fix an issue or two here and there than face down 7 or 8 at once, which is more likely if you don't update often.
You know, I've read several articles online in the last few months which suggest serious problems with Gentoo. But I think it's important to consider the fact that, from my personal perspective and in my own experience, I have had less issues in the last 6 months with Gentoo (except for a hardware failure on one of my main hard drive), than I have had in all the time I've used Gentoo. My system right now is also running more unstable packages than I've ever run, and this is all in amd64.
I admit that I'd stick with Gentoo even if, from my perspective as a user, it was going through a hard time, but on my (KDE desktop) system, which is the main system I use for just about everything, if I didn't read these articles, I would have no idea that anything was going wrong.
I have spent less time maintaining, fixing, or otherwise bringing my system up to date in the last few months than I have in years.
As for interpersonal politics, lack of diplomacy, and immoderate language, I don't think that's anything unique to Gentoo. It may well be that there are some cultural issues which need addressing - not for me to say - and perhaps the departure of key developers may, in the future, affect the user's experience, but for me, this has not yet been the case.
I like Gentoo a lot - in fact, I wound up running it sort of by mistake. As a newcomer to Linux, I'd read (in late 2001) that the Gentoo install was some kind of baptism of fire. I had problems understanding some of the fundamentals of how Linux systems are set up and at the time my Mandrake install was not helping me learn. I installed Gentoo as a lark, with the idea that I might learn some things about Linux that I could apply to Mandrake (which I was running because everyone said, at the time, that it was a great distribution for beginners).
Having gotten it installed on the first try, without any problems whatsoever, I ran it for a little while. Then I fell in love with portage which was - at the time - more reliable than Mandrake's package manager. After a few weeks, I couldn't find a reason to go back to Mandrake. This was just a few months in, after years of being a Windows user (which is why I also take issue with the popular assertion that Gentoo isn't for beginners, because it was ideal for me).
In the time since, I've tried several distributions and use Debian on my router and my file server, because they're old, crotchety machines that I was too lazy to install Gentoo on. But I've yet to find anything which so closely matches my expectation of how my system should work, than Gentoo. Which is why I'd stick with it (that and 5 years of momentum, of course).
For me, Gentoo is about ease of use, and specifically *not* having to spend a lot of time keeping my system up to date. In no way am I suggesting that the assertions of others that "Gentoo is too much work" are invalid, but they certainly have nothing to do with my experience, or that of many other Gentoo users. As for compiling software (for instance), this is a process I run, background, and forget about. Every few months, something a little more involved might require an hour or so of my attention (a major GCC upgrade, for instance) but overall, maintaining my system is simply not a time sink, at all.
And no, I'm not a developer. A computer hobbyist and fan of computers, but hardly some kind of guru. There may be good reasons not to use Gentoo, but I'd hate for anyone to think that these political spats somehow define the distribution or have much to do with the user's experience.
At least, it doesn't, so far, have anything to do with *me*. I still recommend Gentoo wholeheartedly. I have a lot of affection for it. I can and have used other distributions and I could learn to live with just about any distribution if I had to, but I doubt it would be the complete pleasure that Gentoo has been. I don't have hatred for any of the distributions I've tried out (Debian, OpenSuSE, Mandrake, Fedora, Slackware, Kubuntu, and FreeBSD as well), bu
If there is one ugly human pathology I would like to see snuffed out in my lifetime, it is the worship of the state, the tendency to equate states with nations, and the reverence, reification, or deification of political figures.
As to whether or not the State is a necessary evil, that is still, quite obviously, a subject for debate.
But I look forward to a day when mankind - possibly - outgrows the need for the State, and with it, the cults of personality, nationalism, genocide, hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness, and tyranny that are its most toxic products.
Censorship is a sickness, wherever it occurs. Enlightened people the world over need to unite in common cause against it. No one should be able to decide *for you*, what you should read. No state should behave as if it were a parent to its citizens.
States - and their crimes - not only victimize us, but divide us as well. I am not my government. I would hope most people the world over would make this statement with the same conviction that I do.
I am an open advocate of civilization, cooperation, and the decent treatment of other human beings in the world. I am not enamored with lowercase-a anarchy, in the sense of "disorder" - but as the years go by, I am also faced with another realization, and that is that the State is good for one thing; it has only one useful purpose - as something to be dragged down, and, possibly, spat upon in contempt as an exercise in the assertion of individual sovereignty, and, in the case of censorship, the independence of the mind of the individual.
Words are ideas, and those who seek, through censorship, to control ideas, intend to control minds.
Not your friend. Not mine, not anyone's. The ideal response is open defiance, but that's easy for me to say, living thousands of miles away.
Until it happens here, the next go-around. And it will. It does. It always does.
I'm not Armenian or Turkish or Greek; so I have no specific axe to grind at all, except to say that this site, referenced in a previous reply as some sort of "evidence" against the genocide, is pathetic:
http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/
Within 3 paragraphs, it builds the same kind of "they have wealth and power and control information" conspiracy bullshit in the same way anti-Semitic literature does, and then makes this remarkable statement:
"Turks characteristically shun propaganda, and have chosen not to dwell on the tragedies of the past, forging ahead to build upon brotherhood."
That may be true of most Turks, but I have my doubts about the guy publishing this site. Not much brotherhood in that website.
Armenians in the United States, at least, are not a large ethnic group.
"As descendants of the merchant class from the Ottoman Empire, Armenians have been successful in acquiring the wealth and power to make their voices heard... and they have made good use of the "Christian" connection to gain the sympathies of Westerners who share their religion and prejudices."
Is utterly ridiculous. Absurd. Most Americans, I'd wager, have never even heard of the Armenian genocide, or find Armenia (or Turkey for that matter) on a map. I'm not proud of this, but this statement rings like a total fabrication in light of it. As for the other Western nations, I cannot say - I hope they know more about this than I assume most Americans do, but I find it hard to believe that Europeans, for instance, are "just making crap up" to fuck with Turkey.
Either a genocide happened or it did not. Almost to this day, some people expect Germans to continue to apologize for the Holocaust (which is ridiculous and insulting to the generations during and since who have contributed dramatically to the human rights cause and freedom around the world), but the way Germany has dealt with this event in their history (and continues to deal with it) provides an interesting contrast to the way that countries like Turkey (if these comments are representative of the prevalent attitudes in Turkey - I honestly do not know if they are, so I do not mean to impugn all of Turkey) and Cambodia have dealt with theirs.
*Everyone's shit stinks, including Turkey's.* I know, my own country is right now run by monkeys hurling more than their fair of shit - a display of excess so quintessential to the United States. We also have our unfortunate and shameful legacy of slavery and racism and genocide of the American Indians - something pointed at by the stupid website above - and one thing we do not do - most of us, anyway - is deny it. At least, no one I know does. It is part of our legacy, and who we are. We may not have done enough in penance for these sins - I'm the first to admit it - but no one denies that it happened, and that many of our ancestors - relatives - were responsible for it. There is a statue in the center of Santa Fe - a monument, I forget to who - some cowboy - which talks about how he "battled Indian savages". Not only was the word savages ground off of the statue, but a memorial plaque acknowledging our shit treatment of people who owned that land was placed on it as well. A pittance of a gesture, but at least an acknowledgement of it, and anyone who visits the park in the middle of Santa Fe will reflect on what happened where they're standing. The statue is an example of a nation coming to terms - to some degree - with its unsavory past. Acknowledgement alone isn't enough, but it's the first step.
Wikipedia has a map of who recognizes this as genocide, and who does not, hence my comment on Europeans since much of Europe recognizes it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ArmenianGenocid eRecognition.png
Yes, technically this is off topic, but as an American, I'm getting a little tired of having to take responsibilit
Ever since I moved to Arizona, I've enjoyed the luxury of actual access to a local dump. I lived in a place where there was - so far as I know - no public access to landfills; you had to pay some licensed, mobbed up company to dump anything you wanted to.
Here in Southern Arizona, I pay $9.00 to enter with a pickup truck-load of garbage.
As you enter, to the left, there is a fairly postapocalyptic-looking pile where people can dump refrigerators, stoves, and other appliances - and only those things.
There is an area for dumping oil and paint with large barrels for that purpose.
And then there's a big storage container - the kind you can get on to a tractor trailer - where computer stuff can be dumped. I've often been tempted to scavenge stuff from here but I realize that I don't actually *need* any more spare stuff lying around, which is a weird realization. But I wonder where that stuff goes - the website indicates that it is recycled, but not where.
The pit itself, where you'd dump everything else, is interesting. You drive down and just dump stuff on the ground which feels...naughty. Then, these extremely large tractors come by and plow everything under the dirt, so that each day when you go there, you only see a day's worth of trash.
This contrasts to stuff I've always seen on television with massive piles of unsorted garbage stacked up a story high or more.
For computer equipment, I keep stacking it in my garage as I acquire or want to dispose of dead monitors, old computer parts, and so on. Once per year, around Christmas, I drive down to the dump, pay my $9.00, and dump all of it at once into that storage container allocated for computer equipment.
If you just dump computer stuff in your regular trash, you may want to go to your local landfill's website, and see if they have
Not sure I know which quote you're talking about. This one, maybe:
"Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix,"
Like I made clear, I've been running this for 5 years for its pure utility. Whether or not Microsoft has resorted to more dicketry than usual, is irrelevant as to my choice to run it from here on out. I started using it because I wanted a decent command line; in my case, what made me switch wasn't Windows's poor security record (*I* didn't have this problem. I ran a firewall and virus scanner.), or its price, or some kind of ideological objection to commercial software.
What made me switch was the way the command line withered in Windows. Or perhaps it was more, the emphasis on the command line by Linux and operating systems like it. I was using a lot of UNIX re-writes in batch files - DOS versions of UNIX command line mailers (Don't recall which), I think some kind of grep utility, and so on. After awhile, it became clear that it was silly to be doing this when I could just get the whole environment I needed by running Linux (didn't know much about BSD at the time, but it might just as well have been that - to this day, my use of Linux is more out of habit than actually preferring it to, say, FreeBSD.
Is this a "love of UNIX?" I wouldn't put it that way but I guess it is roughly equivalent.
I didn't even know how much I should have been running Linux (or a BSD) all along, until I switched. I bought a very cheap Celeron kit from Tiger Direct for the purpose of "messing around with Linux" on and perhaps doing the command line things I wanted to do on that system as an adjunct to my graphical environment in Windows (I didn't know about Cygwin, or if it was even around then).
What happened was, the first distribution I installed was Mandrake, and I got to using KDE through that (just to play with) and quickly realized that there was no reason to be using Windows anymore, for anything. I kept my Windows 2000 system around awhile, until it fell into disuse and got powered down. Recently I wiped it and put Linux on it to use as a container for hard drives (a backup server.)
I regretted buying such a cheap kit to run it on, but I didn't seriously consider running Linux as my main desktop when I bought it. After all, people were making the point left and right that as great it was as a server, it just "wasn't ready for the desktop."
I recently replaced that Tiger Direct kit with a homebuilt Core 2 Duo. Linux is, as I have pointed out to others, ready for *my* desktop and has been for awhile. I hear a lot of complaints, but I've been working for 5 years on a Linux desktop.
I cannot say whether or not it is ready or appropriate for others' desktops. If it were, I think more people would be running it; but for me it does the job and has for years.
This spite I speak of, merely puts some butter on the the nourishing all-natural, whole wheat bread that Linux has been for me. That was my point.
If it's another quote in that article you're referencing, let me know. I still have to run Windows at work - I have no choice in the matter - I don't gnash my teeth over it, but it certainly isn't my preference, on the basis of the experience alone. Still, I can be fairly productive in Windows so long as I'm just using native applications. And I can even string little hacks together using those aforementioned Windows ports I mentioned, but if I have the option to run Linux or a BSD, why bother?
I suppose if I was a gamer I might have some more to say about Windows and Linux - to me playing Windows games via WINE or virtualization or emulation or whatever in Linux is much the same thing in reverse - better to just get a second machine and run Windows on it for games. For me, personally, that is. (That being said, I do enjoy a little distraction of bzflag from time to time).
Props though, to the BSDs as well. I have no compelling reason to run FreeBSD but if I had to, I'd
In a way we should be thanking Ballmer. A lot of people run Linux now and the thrill of simply putting it on one's machine is long gone.
Ballmer's comments, and the presumable legal action which will follow them in the future, lets us feel like outlaws, non-conformists, and rebels again. SCO was never really a thrilling nemesis
SCO is...well...SCO is...pathetic.
I never really had that thrill of running something as unlikely as Linux; by the time I got it installed (2001), it was pretty popular, installers had made it simple, and it wasn't a big deal. But now, not only will my 5 years of Linux usage be a functional and utilitarian experience (which is the sum total of what it has been thus far)-- but also one of spite and defiance going forward.
I enjoy spite and defiance. Don't you? I'd rather be dragging down kings and military regimes, but this will do as a small snack in my comfortable suburban kitchen.
A small thrill, but it feels good, nonetheless.
I can't be the only one who felt *good* to be a Linux user when I read this.
The chances of me downgrading to something like Vista were null to begin with, but now, well...
The only thing I have to say about Windows is, well, bitch if I need to, I'll run your OS in a *window*.
They're more than slightly larger, in my experience...(than photos)
Still for little web glyphs, logos and so on, it's nice to not have to sweat Microsoft's...inexcusable...lack of support for PNG transparency anymore.
If you think about it, it's kind of annoying really. Microsoft kills Netscape, owns the browser market, then, once all major competitors have been trashed, they let their own browser rot without tabs, and without proper PNG support...for years.
Quag7 you stupid bastard, there's also the file size issue. What a LOSER! What of the people without BROADBAND, on DIALUP!?
I saw an article somewhere, some time ago, that the new IE 7 properly deals with transparency in PNGs (Don't run Windows so I haven't been able to test this). Though I'm pretty sure by now that format is cursed, in a mystical and supernatural way, and people will refuse to use no matter what holes it fills.
Not that it's up to me, but I think whatever party can guarantee in the most absolute terms, with the greatest accountability, should have control over whatever infrastructure needs to be in control of a government agency.
In particular, I'd endorse any group which:
(*) Will not discriminate (thereby censoring) on the basis of fear of explicit sexuality (Looking at you, USA).
(*) Will not discriminate (thereby censoring) on the basis of unpopular political or social views (Racism, nationalism (including the worst sort of Nazism), fascism, anarchism, communism - insert yours here) (Looking at you, Germany, China, some others). I can decide for myself what's offensive, dangerous, or bunk. Don't want any government making that decision for me. Don't really want anyone involved in governing any aspect of the internet who doesn't understand why it's a paradox to use authoritarian tactics and policies to prevent authoritarianism. I don't need authoritarian tactics to be used to protect myself from cults, either (China - Falun Gong). And I sure as hell don't need any governmental organization, should this (god forbid) happen, telling me not to read something like Al Jazeera. If your own population can't resist going all screwy in the head because it is exposed to certain kinds of expression, you are *not qualified* for this job, as a country.
(*) Will not discriminate (thereby censoring) on the basis of language or insist on any kind of language requirement. I'm all for working on better internationalization of domain names (I don't understand much about this, but I've read other posts and I'm all for domains in other character sets, to the extent this is possible, technologically).
(*) Will not attempt to levy taxes on any individual, except as is necessary to fund, non-profit, the physical maintenance of root servers and so on (Looking at you, governments of the world, some more than others).
(*) Will not attempt to discriminate (thereby censoring) on the basis of religion, for or against. Falun Gong, radical hate-filled Wahhabist (whatever term you use for the cult wing of Islam) rants against my own country, the USA - I'll make my own decision on what to read and what I think about it.
(*) Will not attempt intellectual property voodoo or otherwise exercise power over websites with controversial (in some governments) approach to intellectual property. These questions and issues - piracy and so on - need to be dealt with outside of the realm of DNS, domain ownership, and so on.
Any group which can guarantee *not* to do any of these gets my vote.
Domain names need to be *cheap*, *registered without discrimination or censorship concerns*, and every domain owner must have a reasonable set of rights that ensure that domain's accessibility by all locations on the globe. Frankly, just because this is so fundamental to freedom of speech, I don't even think domain names should be taxed - anywhere on the globe.
I'm tired of these pissing contests about which government is least bad. All governments are bad. The one which is most powerful and offensive today, will eventually fade as all empires do, and another will take its place. It's not enough to simply resist certain governments, *today*. There are no governments in the world, nor in history, that couldn't use more shackles, more limits, more checks - there are no politicians or political enforcers who couldn't stand to live in more fear and paranoia of the citizens they claim to represent.
If I can get iron-clad guarantees, enforceability, accountability, and so on, I will support whatever organization or entity guarantees me maximal rights.
But I am unwilling (such that my opinion matters at all) to subject such a system to so-called "democracy" or the means by which one party shoves its sensibilities down the throat of others (I am sorry, but I do not give a shit whatsoever about France's language issues, Germany's bizarre issues with neo-Nazism and free expression, or my own govern
"If there's a kernel of what you believe at the heart of your trolling, consider the difference between 'reasoning' and 'believing', and that there's a vast middle ground between two extremes. Rejecting Stallman's dogma doesn't imply that you've got to blindly adhere to another, any more than rejecting Scientology implies you've got to go become a Jehova's Witness."
My point is that accepting Stallman's point of view doesn't automatically make you "irrational" either. What annoys me isn't that people are critics of Stallman's point of view - that's fair enough and I have some questions myself - but there's this phony air of legitimacy many critics of Stallman have, like their point of view is somehow self-evident, and that Stallman fans are like cult members or something because only someone completely..high...would buy into his point of view.
I hate this. When I was in college, I had political views which clashed with the dominant ideology of others in my major - the response to my objections were rarely reasoned responses, but "c'mon, who are you kidding?" and not much more. I hate the fact that there are always whole sets of ideas and modes of thinking that I am expected to take for granted as obvious and true, when they're not.
Many - not all, but many - opponents of Stallman take this same basic point of view. I guarantee that I can find a counterpoint for you, who insists that their take on economics or political theory or what have you has been "rigorously analyzed" using "science" and so forth. All of my life, I've been around ideologues all over the political spectrum who have insisted to me that theirs is the only sober, rational point of view, and they have mountains of books, dissertations, and theories to prove it...Mutually contradictory parties making the exact same claim.
Stallman fans annoy me in ways other than this for the most part, in part because they know that they're fighting an uphill battle in a way, especially in the United States, where I live, and which historically has less sympathy for noncommercial or anticommercial ventures than - if what I read on the internet is to be believed - other places.
"As for brands, if you were talking about the ongoing Linux versus Windows (or Linux versus whatever) debates, you could rather easily draw a parallel with car brands. What's different about Stallman's acolytes is their obsessive focus on the supposed 'morality' of their ideology, and their droning on about 'freedom', implying that anyone who doesn't agree with them is 'immoral', and 'anti-freedom'. It's that mindset that pushes Stallmanism into the realm of being a cult. (Supporters of 'open source', in contrast, tend to approach the subject rationally, even if some are a bit strange.)"
It's fair enough to disagree that software licenses have much to do with morality (in fact, I don't really buy the Stallman position on this myself - not yet anyway), but I understand why *they* think it is. If you accept share and share-alike as a basic moral premise as many people do - including many on the left, some Christians, and so on - then their point of view makes sense; this would just be an extension of anything else in their outlook. I used to hang around with people who didn't think charity was a virtue. I understood why, given the rest of their philosophy - I even shared it for awhile. Later, when I moved on, I didn't necessary buy it anymore but I acknowledge even today that it is compatible with, and logically flows from, deeper principles these folks have.
I don't have the same obsessions as Stallman does about closed up, proprietary software. I'm not from his generation or his era, and things actually worked in the reverse for me - I started using computers when almost everything was commercial, and only later, did Stallman's "unworkable," "utopian," "pie in the sky," license suddenly present a real alternative to the commercial slop I was using (Linux; I was a Windows user from 1995 until 2002, DOS before that, an
"Do you suppose that people who get bent out of shape by the nonsense spewn by Scientologists actually view L. Ron Hubbard as having been some sort of god? Hardly. The reason Stallman stirs up so much interest is because to a lot of people his ideas are self-evidently ludicrous, but like any cult leader, he has a band of fanatical followers who take anything he says as the absolute truth, seemingly unable to consider it rationally."
It's a lot more like Ford and Chevy fans warring against each other with retaliatory (Calvin pissing on the logo of the other guy's truck manufacturer) stickers. Let's maintain some perspective here, until and unless we see the genesis of a Stallmanite Sea Org Equivalent, where everyone involved signs on for a billion years (the predicted time until a workable HURD release), and has a huge beard. Until then, let's just recognize this debate for what it is, a distraction from things that really matter like war and death and pizza and fucking and stuff.
"It's also, to be honest, interesting to argue with fanatics, to see how they respond to reasoned arguments. Typically, slashbots who adhere to Stallmanism reply by accusing anyone who disagrees with them of being 'an M$ shill', as if they think a childish rejoinder negates reasoned argument. Alternatively, they may ignore the uncomfortable argument altogether (but sometimes still reply, by setting up a strawman, knocking it over and pretending that this has somehow destroyed the argument that upsets them)."
I'm not disagreeing with you some some "adherents of Stallmanism" certainly do exactly what you describe, but then again, I do so enjoy the phony sanctimonious pragmatism - the "Let me tell you how the REAL WORLD is...HIPPIE!" admonitions of the opposition as well. Shit stinks all over both sides of this debate, frankly. But that's what I love about it. And by love, I mean hate, really. And by hate I mean, "am really bored with but keep reading anyway for reasons I don't understand, where I then post long rambling messages about how silly people who post long rambling messages about this subject are."
"At the end of the day, the fact that fanatical zealots who follow a cult leader are able to upset people doesn't mean their cult leader is right, is a god or anything like that. No, it's their decision to give up all attempts at thinking for themselves, and accept all of their leader's pronouncements as truth, that interests people. To thinking individuals, this sort of thing is indeed quite interesting, but also profoundly disturbing."
Well first, my post was intended as humorous provocation - and not a serious declaration about anything. But second of all, I wanted to thank you for supplying the sanctimoniousness here for balance - you being a "thinking individual" and all, unlike those Stallmanite clams with the e-meters you speak of.
"I wouldn't say Stallman is irrelevant or insane (for that matter, L. Ron Hubbard certainly wasn't irrelevant, and probably wasn't insane either). Stallman was a decent programmer (though he mostly only copied existing software),"
I think the first step in coming to any kind of common ground here is to make the point that in 2006, Stallman's software contributions - by which I mean software that he, himself, has written, his skills as a programmer, etc - are irrelevant to the discussion entirely, unless you're the kind of person who likes to discuss, oh, Klingon metaphysics, the "selling out" of the trance party scene, and/or the sociological ramifications of tentacle rape hentai (just as examples).
The debate is fundamentally about the GPL and whether or not:
(a) It restricts freedom by prohibiting the closing up of source code.
(b) It increases freedom by prohibiting the closing up of source code.
And just to maintain the sort of noble traditions established by, oh, the abortion debate, it is really crucially important here that people talk right past each other, complicate matt
Considering the number of people who consider Stallman irrelevant, heavy-handed, dogmatic, insane, and so on, who still take valuable time out of their day to bitch and whine about him every time there's an article about him, I'd say you're right. Never has someone so "irrelevant" attracted so many long, bile-filed posts expounding on his irrelevance, dogmatism, and so on.
Inside every critic of Stallman you've ever read on Slashdot or sites like it, is a crazed, wild-eyed fanboy. Nothing else can possibly explain the amount of effort that has gone into commenting on him. People who are irrelevant aren't written about, quoted, smeared, and attacked as often as Stallman is.
Face it, all of you: The man is a God. Your god. And the more you profess to hate him the more we know you have a serious crush on him. Don't bother denying it.
You, who never hesitates to write about how much you supposedly dislike Stallman - you just want to bury your face in his considerable mane, where you'll feel...safe...and warm, and you'll never want to let go.
If you want to understand pretty much everything that's gone wrong in the United States, this post encapsulates it incredibly well.
Help.
They're thinking, "And to think, many light years away, people are having serious discussions about how horrible and ravaging a debilitating WoW habits can be."
This is actually key - and not just subversive marketing but marketing in general. My own mental habit when watching television - and this is automatic; I couldn't *stop* thinking this way - is to sort of "remote view" the conversations in the advertising agency, and then reduce the commercial down to its essential elements:
"Lifestyle. If I don't own this, I'm not cool."
"Buy this and it will get me laid." (I salute the various body spray ads using this technique so nakedly, it was probably considered risky when first proposed - it's one thing to subtly add sexual imagery to commercials - it's another to just make a naked claim that a product will get you laid. And it's worked. Which says very little for the modern 18-24 year old male, frankly.)
Then I picture the imagery the agency decides on, the song choice, and how it was conceived, laboratory style, to try to manipulate me.
I apply the same mental circuits to religion, ideology, and so on.
When this mental process becomes automatic, the desire to consume drops significantly because it generally makes me feel somewhat insulted - the usually cheap, manipulative nature of advertising and so on. Even great advertising is pretty bad if you break it down to its calculated, constituent parts.
As Rosco P. Coltrane (how's Flash doing btw?) mentions, it's increasingly necessary to be aware of these things whenever you expose yourself to any kind of retail environment, for the reasons he lists.
Lastly, avoid retail environments altogether unless you specifically want to buy a certain product.
It's hard for me to get wound up about consumer culture because it really requires only a few easily-learned habits to innoculate yourself against it. Like anyone else, I buy products, but I research, especially higher-end items, to the point of analysis paralysis, before putting my money down. I take a shopping list with me to the supermarket.
Sheriff Little of Chickasaw county agrees, btw.
The smell of bread or cookies or whatever, will probably initially cause this thought: "mmmm cookies."
The immediate second thought should be, "How cheap and insulting."
Authoritarianism, fraud, and a country which confuses comfort for freedom (while ranting about freedom endlessly), is the explanation you're looking for. Add to it graft, corruption, and influence of companies like Diebold, and you'll get fries with that as well.
I'm not sure your post is fair. Despite the problems you list, free operating systems have come *this* far. There are quite a few very usable, (in fact, some quite polished) linux distributions which have been developed by volunteers.
Whatever Gentoo's organizational problems, no one should get the idea that the distro itself is falling apart. Frankly, if I didn't see stories like this, as a Gentoo user, I wouldn't know something was seriously wrong.
I assume you were using hyperbole when you said that Gentoo packages were broken "half of the time." Well, I just re-emerged world - that's every package on my system, because I'd updated to a new gcc version.
The results were 6 out of 743 packages didn't compile. When I tried to compile them again, 2 worked, leaving 4 out of 740 packages with problems - not exactly a disaster; that's just over half of a percent broken packages.
This was approximately the same as on my other Gentoo box which uses a different arch (the above is x86_64, this other one is x86).
This has been my experience consistently - would I like a 100% working stable branch? Yes. It's worth working toward. Is my system an unstable shambles? On average I reboot every 60 days or so when I upgrade my kernel. I wouldn't call that...rickety.
You call a decade and a half (speaking of Linux) of volunteer Linux development "This quaint social experiment of altruistic development"?
I'm sorry, but I have disagree - that is a seriously skewed perspective. If I read your post, I would conclude that Linux hadn't risen above, oh, MS-DOS in terms of usability and sophistication.
I've been using a Gentoo Linux desktop for 5 years and Debian production servers at work for three. I don't mean to suggest I'm an expert, but I do have a fair amount of experience with these "quaint social experiments," and it could be that you're just letting off some steam, but if not, I find it hard to agree with your assessment of the situation.
In my opinion the reality is that the volunteer development process is (and always has been) imperfect, and can probably be improved - in fact, this model has been around long enough that now is a good time for a re-assement of social dynamics of such a system.
Nor is it purely altruistic - developing software (I assume) gives a volunteer developer a sense of personal satisfaction, credibility, esteem from others, and even something to put on a resume. Users could stand to be a tad more courteous and grateful to developers, this much is true, and I don't want to speak for developers but I find it hard to believe they consider themselves religious clerics slavishly serving users out of some sense of self-sacrifice. I am personally deeply thankful for their efforts. Perhaps some developers could add to this discussion in terms of their motivations.
People have really been unfair to the GPL, volunteer developers, and so on - immoderate and sometimes mean-spirited in their criticism. Let's not forget what this "quaint social experiment" has in fact yielded. I know - I use products of that process every day.
I hope people smarter at social dynamics and project management than I am can improve the process, but, well, Gentoo and Debian work for me, professionally and as a hobbyist.
To suggest that this system is some kind of a lark or failure simply contradicts the basic reality of the situation. I'm surprised you feel as you do, as I assume by your post that you use or have used one or several free UNIX-like OSes. Your assessment of the situation could not be further from my own.
Lastly, and I'll be a bit of a broken record with this, Gentoo is not for everyone. It is not intended as a side-by-side replacement to something like SLED though with some work it can certainly work that way. Gentoo is for tinkerers, developers, and people who are interested in the OS itself, rather than simply what can be accomplished with the OS. It's definitely for me but I don't think less of anyone who couldn't be bothered with Gentoo.
If anything, I hope to see the problems addressed simply so life will be easier on developers, and encourage them to stick around (and new ones to contribute).
I am curious how many people use this as their main distro, and how they got there. I have yet to run into a single person who has settled on this. Hell, I've barely even run into anyone interested in trying it.
...Unless there is some significant advantage to this distribution, but honestly looking at YaST, I don't understand how much easier it needs to get. I'm sort of surprised this distribution is still around. Is the company profitable?
So if anyone is reading this and does use this as their main distro, I'm curious why you use it, and what you tried before it.
Because I'm just not clear on the point of this distribution. Looking at free (as in beer) Linux distributions like OpenSuSE and *buntu, I just don't understand why anyone would pay for this.
Paying for home desktop Linux just strikes me as....bizarre.
(And no, I'm not a SuSE user, but I've played with it.)
Someone step in and drop some science on this please.
And this is the reason for IVRs. The company wants you *not* to call because support costs are high. In any situation where there is online servicing, the company wants you to use that instead.
Phone support is expensive. IVRs are there as much to to sour people on the idea of calling at all as they are to properly direct calls.
Infuriating as this is (and crappy as it can sometimes be), it is amazing the routine crap people will wait on hold for 20 minutes for, not to mention the time they spend navigating the IVR, when they could have gotten their answer in 30 seconds by just going to the website.
I think this situation sucks most for people who do not have an internet connection or are calling for support for a downed internet connection.
Since most companies use IVRs now, it's not as if having a labyrinthine phone system will drive customers away (what competitors don't have that?). What needs to happen is for consumers to change their mindset about support and be willing to pay extra for it, while at the same time, online support mechanisms (including live agent chat) need to be improved. The alternative is for the whole industry to up the cost to consumers for goods and services to provide for more robust phone support. That's not going to happen because consumers will live with just about anything. One thing consumers will not abide by is inconvenience, regardless of the cost, and for example, switching ISPs (when that's even a reasonable alternative - in the US, many areas are completely monopolized by one or two companies, broadband-wise) is a serious inconvenience.
It's like how people bitch about Windows but still buy it either explicitly by forking money over, or paying the Microsoft tax when they buy a computer. Or how a lot of people complain about Wal-Mart, and shop there anyway. Likewise, companies with crap support - including infuriating IVRs, well, the frustration of that wears off fairly quickly.
Phone support is a cost - a drag on profits, a necessary evil at best, as far as most companies are concerned.
This is the first message I have ever encountered which mentions child porn and cream cheese in the same sentence.